BrM's challenge mode

thinking about it for a long time, now its time to do some gold challenges. I dont know anything yet about doing these modes, all i know is that some adds are skipable but i dont think that work on challenge modes. Did you do challenge mode as brewmaster? Any information you can provide? Thanks!

not sure what we will be running but i can be sure it will be me + arms/fury + ele sham

replace that second ring with a 463, things will drop ilvl's in challenge modes, you won't really hit that haste cap, however you could reforge gear to have less exp/hit, since you won't need as much against 82 bosses, rather than what's recommended for 83' skulled raid bosses.

the ring won't increase ilvl, not a huge difference but every little bit counts in challenge modes.

I was wondering about gate of the setting sun, i already know some cool "shortcuts" to save time.

thanks everyone!

---------- Post added 2012-12-09 at 09:27 AM ----------

Originally Posted by Christan

replace that second ring with a 463, things will drop ilvl's in challenge modes, you won't really hit that haste cap, however you could reforge gear to have less exp/hit, since you won't need as much against 82 bosses, rather than what's recommended for 83' skulled raid bosses.

the ring won't increase ilvl, not a huge difference but every little bit counts in challenge modes.

do you actually know whats the numeric cap (not the %, the ammount) to not miss/get dodged or parried for 82 bosses?

replace that second ring with a 463, things will drop ilvl's in challenge modes, you won't really hit that haste cap, however you could reforge gear to have less exp/hit, since you won't need as much against 82 bosses, rather than what's recommended for 83' skulled raid bosses.

the ring won't increase ilvl, not a huge difference but every little bit counts in challenge modes.

do you actually know whats the numeric cap (not the %, the ammount) to not miss/get dodged or parried for 82 bosses?

cant find it

You multiply the % by 340, not that hard is it?

Gear wise, I think its best to get items with as much sockets as possible, and set bonuses are quite decent for BrM, too.
I only did a few silver runs because none of my guildies were very interested in challenge modes, I imagine it won't be too bad if you're going for full gold.
From the ones I tried, I'd say you should definitely avoid scarlet monastery, because some packs tend to stun you and proceed to one-shot you.. which would require careful CC and therefore wasting time, when you could use a DK instead and just immune the stuns.

I'm aware that if you had something that was exactly double the stats of a ilvl 463, lets say, for example use this:

1000 agil
1500 stam
800 crit
800 haste

It gets scaled down to:

500 agil
750 stam
400 crit
400 haste

But what if the item has hit/expertise? You don't lose any hit/expertise while in challenge modes, but is that extra stat taken out of the other secondary? I can't really tell. Using the previous example:

1000 agil
1500 stam
800 crit
800 hit

turns into:

500 agil
750 stam
400 crit
800 hit OR

500 agil
750 stam
0 crit
800 hit?

If hit/expertise remain the same while the other stat does NOT get penalized, then there's a definite advantage in using higher ilvl gear (as long as there's some hit/expertise on or reforged to on the item.)

I'm not exactly sure how the scaling works but it'll maintain(as close to possible) the same levels of expertise/hit you had before entering across all your pieces but it still rebalances your other stats.

Aim to get a full set of fully optimized items for challenge modes - the stat priorities will change depending on what dungeon you're running, but say you want to stack mastery for a certain one, make sure to have as many mastery pieces as possible. Also, sockets - they're amazing, sha-touched weapons are awesome as well. The problem is that brewmasters are atrocious for challenge modes, I'd recommend just going DPS, or prepare to kite... a lot. Basically, one stun and you're dead since almost all our mitigation is avoidance. Having a DK/War/Pala just makes it so much simpler.

Everyone thinks this is true but in reality it's not even close, we have excellent AoE damage which is the crux of challenge modes. The only packs that hurt with a stun are a few pulls in monastery, which also hurt DK/War/Paladins too. Taken care of by having someone in your group stun them back. The only time you genuinly have to kite is the 40+ Hozens at the start of brewery, as does every tank.

Brewmasters are perfectly capable of getting very good gold times, you don't need to rely on shuffle/elusive brew - most the time you can spend all your chi on BoF/Chi Wave.

Heh, yeah, I rolled a brewmaster based almost solely on their challenge mode prowess. Averaging ~80-100k dps over the course of the entire dungeon sure cuts down on time vs the other tanks languishing around 60k. I'd advocate stacking crit over either haste or mastery though.

Heh, yeah, I rolled a brewmaster based almost solely on their challenge mode prowess. Averaging ~80-100k dps over the course of the entire dungeon sure cuts down on time vs the other tanks languishing around 60k. I'd advocate stacking crit over either haste or mastery though.

In many dungeons you'll want to increase your aoe damage rather than single target damage, in which case haste wins over crit (and Ascension wins over Power Strikes).

Is the sck channel affected by haste? Even so, SCK is like ~15-20% of my overall damage, whereas crit affects 100% of my damage. By far my most damaging aoe abilities are keg smash and breath of fire.

SCK (and fists of fury for windwalkers) does indeed cast faster based on haste. Furthermore, the energy regen provided by haste affects your overall damage. It's not simply a matter of making SCK cast faster, nor is it simply a matter of doing more damage, you still have to live on the pulls, and that will involve spending chi (which you get more of, with more haste), which is also used for BoF.

Fair enough. I happened to have skada of two challenge modes I did yesterday saved, and after some napkin analysis, 1 crit rating gives me about as much damage as 3.5 haste rating. As I didn't have an issue with survival, I'll stick with crit. Didn't know that haste affected sck channel though (curious why we don't get a cast bar for that).

In many dungeons you'll want to increase your aoe damage rather than single target damage, in which case haste wins over crit (and Ascension wins over Power Strikes).

Not really, crit is a better stat for DPS for BM, haste is just better when it comes to damage mitigation, even more so for AOE as SCK scales way better with crit than haste. Sure, Ascension is better for DPS (more uptime on SCK), and you should probably use that for the most part.

From my experience(only refined a few times, been busy selling gold runs) the consistent nature of haste and the bonus chi for BoF far outweights any meager increase in crit you'd be able to obtain, I'd wager agility gems beat out everything though. What it mostly comes down to is how you play, as long as you're not gemming something ludicrous like stamina.